The blog has been dormant for a while now since my return to Singapore, and what better way to revive it than through a review of the fine meal I had over this festive season! On Christmas Eve I visited Hide Yamamoto restaurant with family for my first good dinner since relocation. It was a treat from my aunt. This restaurant is located on the second floor of one of our local casinos Marina Bay Sands, thankfully sheltered from the loud and smoky main gambling space below. The second floor also houses other celebrity restaurants, not surprising considering the moneyed casino crowd.
I didn't know much about Yamamoto except for the fact that he was trained in France and Italy, and is the owner of a couple of Italian restaurants in Tokyo. This Singapore restaurant is his first foreign outpost. The spacious establishment is divided into five sections serving different types of Japanese cuisines (sushi, teppanyaki, robatayaki, ramen and sake & shochu bar), and parties with different preferences are allowed to sit in any of the preferred sections. The restaurant also serves a seasonal kaiseki in limited sets, and only by reservation. I would have loved to try the kaiseki but by the time my aunt made the reservation, the allocated sets for Christmas Eve dinner had all been taken, which was a pity. The staff also didn't tell her that people who wanted to eat sushi (the next best thing to me) would have to sit at the sushi counter for the sake of freshness of delivery, which caused some initial confusion upon arrival, but at least the manager did personally apologise to her for his staff's oversight. We were all in a good mood so we just left it at that, but this is one detail that the restaurant does need to highlight to future customers. As the elders in my family were all going for teppanyaki (they do not take raw food) it made no sense for the whole party to relocate to the sushi section just for my sake, so I simply went with the flow and joined them in whatever they would be having.
I cannot say that I wasn't a little skeptical of how good this restaurant's outwardly Japanese offerings could be, considering that the chef patron's training and business are mainly in Italian cuisine, not the Japanese staples. Still, I approached this dinner with as much openness as I could muster.
We found ourselves round a large teppanyaki counter, where a chef would be assigned to cook for us this evening. The most distinctive feature of teppanyaki cuisine is the live searing of food on a stainless steel top, often in a flamboyant manner - originating from way before restaurants in the Western world discovered the magic of open kitchens. I remember being mesmerised by teppanyaki's fun and lively cooking demonstrations as a child, as if attending a culinary circus. It had been ages since I had had a good teppanyaki meal, so I was looking forward to what they might come up with here!
We went for the set menu which features a variety of seafood and other side dishes. These were an assortment of appetisers including beef flakes with goat's cheese, prawn with caviar, salmon sashimi, and a mixed green salad with bonito flakes and sesame dressing. Pleasant, but not particularly interesting except for the beef with goat's cheese which had a rich creamy texture and some lovely deep flavours to kick-start the palate.
The variety of dips served to go with the rest of the dinner were impressive though! These included sesame & mustard sauce, Himalayan pink salt, deep fried garlic chips, ponzu with oroshi, and soy sauce with fresh wasabi (so difficult to come by outside Japan!).
Gindara (black cod), perfectly seared on the outside for a lovely caramelised edge, and cooked just right to preserve all its natural juices, soft flaky texture and rich oily flavour.
Salmon, mashed potato and egg mayonnaise with a dash of mustard. Like the previous cod, very well seared, nicely browned on the outside, with flaky and oily flesh. The accompaniments were lovely - a chunky and creamy egg mayonnaise with a touch of spice complemented the rich taste of the salmon very well, while the smooth and buttery mashed potato contributed an apt weight to this dish.
Chawanmushi (steamed savoury egg custard) with black truffle and a fresh uni (sea urchin) topping. This was to die for! The smooth and feather-light texture of the egg belied a deep earthy fragrance from a black truffle infusion as well as bits of black truffle within the custard. The sea urchin was the jewel in the crown with its light creamy texture and sweet umami.
Hokkaido scallop and Malaysian tiger prawn. They were both very sweet and juicy, with a pleasant firm bite. A nice squeeze of lemon was all that was needed to heighten the fresh natural flavours of the seafood.
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| Our chef for the evening, Yohei-san. |
Fresh lobsters - look at all that clear translucent flesh and sweet creamy roe within! Just like the earlier scallops and prawns, only a dash of lemon juice was needed to enhance its delicate umami. The roe was, needless to say, heavenly.
Assorted vegetables. The quick searing was a great idea as it sealed in all their juices and preserved their natural crunch, in addition to providing a deep caramelised edge. The eggplant coming from Japan in particular had a very sweet taste and a texture that was both juicy and creamy - too bad there was only such a small slice of it!
Zuwai kani kamameshi (snow crab rice), a traditional Japanese rice dish that has been cooked in a kama (iron pot). This was lovely - the fresh shredded crab was extremely sweet and the ankake sauce (a traditional Japanese thick sauce) with which the rice had been mixed provided a delightful umami, while shimeji mushrooms further enhanced the rice with earthy aromas and a nice juicy crunch. The whole dish was flavourful, balanced and sophisticated. This was a very close contender for my favourite dish of the evening, together with the chawanmushi earlier.
Kagoshima A4 wagyu sirloin. Look at that beautiful marbling! My mouth was watering as I heard the meat sizzle.
The meat was seared to a beautiful medium rare consistency. The juices were oozing with each bite and the meat had a rich fatty taste. Lovely.
Garlic fried rice with miso soup. This was actually the only disappointing course of the evening, as I found the rice somewhat soggy and bland. It could at least have done with more garlic. The miso soup had a deeper and more intense flavour, definitely of a higher quality than those found in run-of-the-mill Japanese restaurants, but it is just miso soup after all.
Desserts were predominantly Western-styled, occasionally with Japanese twists. They were also very festively designed! We ordered one each, and between the six of us covered all the seasonal offerings.
This was a chocolate soufflé with a touch of Grand Marnier surrounded by crème anglaise, and vanilla ice cream on a crushed wafer base. The contrast in temperatures between the warm soufflé and the ice cream was delightfully stimulating for the palate. The moist spongy shell also concealed a lovely rich molten chocolate centre. The only Japanese aspect here was a sprinkling of finely crushed matcha biscuits, which provided an apt bitter complement to the chocolatey intensity of this dessert. I did feel that this dessert would have fit much better in a French restaurant, though of course there was nothing wrong with it per se.
This was matcha tiramisu with chocolate and meringue. More like a parfait than a tiramisu, the mascarpone appeared as a solid block of ice cream, topped with roughly crushed matcha biscuits, another matcha ice cream, and chocolate biscuit strips. Swirls of chocolate cream and crushed meringue pieces surrounded the 'tiramisu'. This dessert was pretty and pleasant enough but I thought it was more style over substance. It was too one-dimensional in texture (felt like an ice-cream cake), and was definitely nowhere near an authentic representation of a tiramisu.
This was mango pudding with vanilla ice cream and jellied balls of watermelon and rock melon. Probably the most Singaporean/tropical dessert of the menu, this was solid enough but also lacked any particular interest or sophistication. The real chunks of mango within the pudding were a lovely touch though.
Finally, this was a Japanese re-interpretation of the classic French Mont Blanc, with chestnut cream, kinako (roasted soybean) cream, kinako ice cream, chocolate coated chestnut sponge and chestnut meringue, and swirls of chestnut purée. The chestnut cream and purée were intense, with a full-bodied nutty taste, but fortunately not too sweet. The very Japanese pairing with kinako was entirely apt, with its delicate sweet roasted taste permeating the ice cream as well as two smaller mounds of light cream. This was probably the most sophisticated dessert of the evening, artfully deconstructed yet retaining strong references to the French original.
The service tonight had been very good. Our chef Yohei-san was a man of few words but he did his job behind the teppanyaki counter very well. The food he cooked had generally been very good (except maybe for the garlic rice) and the timing of courses had been just right, so that we could still chat amongst ourselves and eat at a comfortable pace. The other staff were similarly attentive but not obstrusive; for example, our tea cups were being constantly refilled, and there was at least one server stationed close to our table at any time throughout the dinner.
However, I still couldn't help feeling that this whole experience hadn't exactly been good value for money, even though the freshness and quality of ingredients were beyond doubt. Notwithstanding the restaurant's location in a casino, the portion sizes were really quite small, and teppanyaki is after all a pretty uniform style of cooking with not much complexity in seasoning / accompaniments / presentation needed, so once in a while I did catch myself thinking 'okay, it's all great but what next?'. The starters and some of the desserts which came from the main kitchen were also rather lacklustre - nicely plated but lacking real ingenuity in the composition of flavours and textures. Perhaps I have been spoilt by restaurants overseas, but when the bill runs to well over $250 per person after taxes, it might not be unreasonable to expect food that transcends the merely solid. For these reasons I hesitate to say that I will return any time soon (the same price usually gets me an amazing Michelin-starred tasting menu overseas) but perhaps the raw stuff or seasonal dishes here might be truly stellar - all I need now is a windfall from the heavens!
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